Asia, once a vaccination laggard, is revving up inoculations
As the United States and Europe ramped up their COVID-19 vaccination programs, the Asia-Pacific region, once lauded for its pandemic response, struggled to get them off the ground. Now, many of those laggards are speeding ahead, lifting hopes of a return to normality in nations resigned to repeated lockdowns and onerous restrictions.
The turnabout is as much a testament to the region's success in securing supplies and working out the kinks in their programs as it is to vaccine hesitancy and political opposition in the United States. South Korea, Japan and Malaysia have even pulled ahead of the U.S. in the number of vaccine doses administered per 100 people - a pace that seemed unthinkable in the spring. Several have surpassed the United States in fully vaccinating their populations or are on track to do so, limiting the perniciousness of the delta variant of the coronavirus.
In South Korea, the authorities said vaccines had helped keep most people out of the hospital. About 0.6% of fully vaccinated people who contracted COVID had severe illness and about 0.1% died, according to data collected by the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency from May to August. In Japan, serious cases have fallen by half over the last month, to a little over 1,000 a day. Hospitalizations have plummeted from a high of just over 230,000 in late August to around 31,000 on Tuesday.
"It's almost like the tortoise and the hare," said Jerome Kim, director general of the International Vaccine Institute, a nonprofit organization based in Seoul and focused on vaccine research for the developing world. "Asia was always going to use vaccines when they became available." Risks remain for the region. Most of the countries do not manufacture their own vaccines and could face supply problems if their governments approve boosters.
In Southeast Asia, the rollout has been slow and uneven, dragging down economic prospects there. The Asian Development Bank recently lowered its 2021 growth outlook for developing
Asia to 7.1% from 7.3%, in part over vaccination issues. But for much of the region, the shift has been striking, success that is rooted in its different worldviews and governance structures.
In a contrast with the United States, vaccines were never a polarizing issue in Asia-Pacific. Although each country has had to contend with its own anti-vaccine movements, they have been relatively small. They have never benefited from an ecosystem - sympathetic media, advocacy groups and politicians - that has allowed misinformation to influence the populace.
Overall, most Asians have trusted their governments to do the right thing, and they were willing to put the needs of the community over their individual freedoms.
Reuben Ng, an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy who has studied vaccine hesitancy globally for the past decade, said that pre-COVID, the discussion around immunization had always been mixed in Asia because of some skepticism about the safety. But Ng and his team, who have been analyzing media reports, have found that the region now holds mostly positive views on vaccines.
There is widespread belief in Asia that vaccines are the only way out of the pandemic. This month, when a vaccination center in Tokyo offered 200 walk-in shots for young people, hopefuls queued from the early morning hours, and the line extended for blocks. In South Korea, when the authorities opened vaccinations to people in their 50s, roughly 10 million simultaneously logged on to a government website to sign up for shots. The system, which was designed to process up to 300,000 requests at a time, temporarily crashed.
People in poorer nations whose lives were upended by extended lockdowns felt they had no choice but to get vaccinated. Indonesia and the Philippines are home to thousands of daily-wage workers who cannot rely on unemployment benefits to survive.
Arisman, 35, a motorcycle taxi driver in Jakarta, Indonesia, said he got his second shot of the Chinesemade Sinovac vaccine in July because his job involved contact with many people.